Rob O'Connor delves into Man City's Champions League ban and ponders whether it could actually be a good wake-up call for modern football ownership.
When the tears from Manchester City’s Champions League ban have dried, and when those who’ve benefited from the mischievous account-keeping have taken a close-up look at how the other half live, there might be room enough to reflect on how we ended up here.
Something like this has been coming ever since Roman Abramovich spent the first rubles that started Chelsea’s revolution in 2003. There has always been something clearly askew with a system that lets a benefactor walk his chosen club around the outside of the premise that success in sport is to be earned, intrinsic in which is the sub-premise that financial power is a run-off of success on the pitch. So clearly in fact, that people got bored of pointing it out really rather quickly.
Instead, a subversion of that basic premise took over, a revisionist rearrangement of the past to justify the mess in the present. Isn’t this just how success works in business? Money is put in to a project from outside so that its owners can seek out and remunerate the best talent, grow the company and place themselves at the forefront of specialist development in their field. The more we thought it through, the more it seemed to make sense.
It’s how industry changes and grows; there has to be money in the pot in order to challenge the form, rather than focusing solely on the pallid day-to-day of getting by. Teams at the bottom end of the league do what they do – long balls, looking for re-starts, disrupting the play – because that’s how to survive against better-resourced sides. Manchester City, Chelsea and Paris Saint Germain approach the technicalities of their work entirely differently, because they are free to invest in a wider diversity of talent and skills.
Football trends appear and spread out from the top down. So isn’t criticizing a model of investment that speeds up and exaggerates that process somewhat contrary and eventually self-defeating? Nice try. Now that the rules have finally caught up and held moneyed entitlement to account, it’s time for another re-adjustment in how we judge football’s relationship with wealth.
It shouldn’t need stating – not after all these years of club owners peacocking as benevolent investors instead of, say, narcissistic billionaires – that sport doesn’t behave like business. It merely shares some of its peripheral features, realities like people needing to be paid at the end of the month. Where it departs is in what happens when one competitor gets too far out in front. In football, put too much distance between the leader and the chasing pack, and the whole ecosystem atrophies.
This is what Financial Fair Play tries in its travails to protect against. Relative to the scale of the problem, the regulations are actually fairly weak. As the state of the game should tell us, they are easy enough to nip around. Small wonder then that City’s owners are indignant about getting caught.
PSG dominating France
PSG have shown just how depressing billionaires really can make things when they get their own way. So much so that you almost wonder what the ideal final outcome was. The club’s Qatari owners have bought themselves dominance of French football for all time. There’s still the Champions League to conquer, but even if as the law of average suggests they eventually spend their way to success on the continent, it still leaves a team walking at half-pace around Ligue 1 collecting up league titles to muted thrills.
It isn’t just in France where one club has become so financially powerful as to make the rest of the league moribund. The problem is rife in Eastern Europe.
In Ukraine Shakhtar Donetsk, backed by the country’s richest man Rinat Akhemtov, have won eight of the last 10 titles, not because they are a traditionally powerful club, but because aggressive expansion under their patron has turned them from a financial basket case facing bankruptcy into a European powerhouse that even the country’s most successful teams can’t compete with fiscally.
Other country’s have it even worse. In Moldova (Sheriff Tiraspol, 19 titles in 21 years), in Azerbaijan (Qarabag, six titles in a row and counting), in Bulgaria (Ludogorets Razgrad, eight in a row and counting), in Belarus (BATE Borisov, 13 in a row up to 2018), the domestic leagues have been reduced to exercises in futility by private owners who have artificially elevated previously unfashionable teams to preeminence.
In England, the Premier League resists this kind of dominance from one side because of the huge money that comes in from media sources and its relatively fair distribution around the league. So what exactly is the problem with it over here?
We’ve seen the shoots of something possibly unhealthy for years. Chelsea and Manchester City have both sacked managers that had brought them unprecedented success, each of them on the strength of a single trophy-less 12 months (Chelsea, Jose Mourinho in 2007 and Carlo Ancelotti in 2011; Man City, Roberto Mancini in 2013). Chelsea’s use of the loan system gives them the nebulous assurance of banking on a few of their crop growing into saleable assets, but at the cost of the development of all the rest, shuffled around by their parent club like musical chairs.
Man City, for their turn, saw what was being done well at another club and bought up its architects as a job lot. Ferran Soriano, Tixi Bergstein and Pep Guardiola reproduced Barcelona in England’s North-West, but however magnificent some of the football, it will always be just that – a re-production. And what will be left if Uefa’s FFP sanctions trigger a raft of departures? An imprint? A shell? A formerly provincial football club scuttling about in the cold trying to remember what it used to represent?
Because that’s the great risk involved in any relationship grounded in emotion (vanity if we’re being cynical; a recent but sincere love for the club if we’re not) – it comes and goes. For every Shakhtar Donetsk, there’s a Metalist Kharkiv, Ukraine’s traditional ‘third’ team that overshot and went to the wall in 2016 after their benefactor pulled his millions out of the club. And remember Anzhi Makhachkala, with Samuel Eto’o up front and Roberto Carlos terrorizing the touchline in 2013? Catch them this weekend playing in Russia’s third division.
So maybe this couldn’t have come soon enough for City. The strength of relationships between the club and its staff will be tested, if the Court of Arbitration for Sport upholds the ban. Football’s whole system of cost-reward will be vulnerable to the fall-out of lavish attention turned to bitter recrimination. It’s likely there’ll be tears before bedtime.
But if it means the game takes a much-needed turn away from covetous overtures of billionaires and back towards a respect for sporting ethics, surely we can live with it.
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